In many different environments, discrete articles having a wide range of characteristics are sorted, following which groups of such articles having only certain selected characteristics are handled separately. One such environment of particular interest is the handling of articles of food such as eggs, fruits and vegetables such as apples, oranges, tomatoes, kiwis, peppers, etc. Such food articles present particular difficulties because of their fragility, coupled with the need to handle such articles with an increasingly higher speed. Achieving higher speed is especially difficult in the case of relatively fragile articles such a eggs.
Numerous systems have been known for many years for the automatic handling of eggs. In these systems the eggs first pass through preliminary steps including washing, inspecting for quality, weighing for size, and possibly also, inspecting for color, followed by sorting out of eggs having certain selected characteristics such as grade and weight and then packaging same. Examples of said systems are shown in prior U.S. patents including Scollard U.S. Pat. No. 3,224,579, Reading U.S. Pat. No. 3,342,012, van Kettenbrock U.S. Pat. No. 4,383,613 and McEvoy U.S. Pat. No. 4,569,444.
Notwithstanding the existence of numerous known egg handling systems, the need continues to exist for a new and improved article handling method and apparatus, particularly for food articles, and especially eggs, which will permit increased capacity in the sorting and packaging of such articles.